


Semantics

by linndechir



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: (of sorts), Booty Calls, Established Relationship, M/M, Sexting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2014-10-12
Packaged: 2018-02-20 22:50:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2446028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linndechir/pseuds/linndechir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nightingale may not quite have got the hang of texting yet, but he's getting better at it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Semantics

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fallencrest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallencrest/gifts).



> Written last week for a tumblr fic meme for the prompt “sexting” and I completely forgot to repost it on AO3. In return fallencrest wrote [this wonderful little fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2445344) for me.

_Please return to the Folly after the enquiry. I have need of you. Nightingale_

I read his text just as I was getting back into the Asbo. Nightingale had sent me to follow up on a tip he'd received from one of his many mysterious informants – he really needed to introduce them to me some day – but he'd already warned me before that 9 times out of 10, this particular informant called him for nothing. The only reason he still bothered was that the tenth time was usually worth investigating. Unfortunately – or maybe fortunately – this hadn't been one of those times. This particular “ghost sighting” had involved no ghosts whatsoever and only an old lady with too much time and an active imagination. I understood why Nightingale had sent me instead of bothering to come here himself.

I considered calling him to ask what the hell had happened and if I should maybe call for back-up. Nightingale had texted me maybe a dozen times at most since I'd given him the mobile phone two years ago, usually because there had been an emergency of some sort. All my attempts at getting him to use his phone more often had only been met with that half exasperated, half blank stare he reserved for pop culture references and reassurances that this or that particular bit of modern technology was actually useful and not a waste of his time.

But I decided that if he'd had the time to text me, he would have had the time to contact Seawoll or Frank Caffrey if necessary, so instead I just drove back into central London as fast as I could. While London traffic can usually be relied on to be particularly bad whenever you need to get somewhere quickly, it was surprisingly manageable that afternoon, maybe because 3pm was still too early for most commuters to be heading home. I made it back to the Folly in just a bit over half an hour, parked the Ford next to the Jag and tried hard not to break into a run as I hurried into the Folly itself.

“Inspector?” I called into the atrium, and I let out a sigh of relief when I saw Nightingale at the top of the stairs to the first floor balcony. He was wearing one of his favourite suits, elegant, single-breasted and a deep blue, and I could see the gleam of his mother-of-pearl cufflinks when he put his hand on top of the balustrade. Not the kind of suit he'd wear if he expected trouble, and he seemed perfectly calm.

“Ah, Peter, there you are,” he said and gave me a small smile. “I trust Mrs Holt didn't have any relevant information?”

“No. And I'm fairly sure your informant is having a lot of fun wasting your time by making you – or in this case me – talk to bored old ladies,” I said, but I didn't want to complain too much. If Nightingale said those tips were still worth checking, I believed him. “What's going on?”

I started up the stairs when he didn't come down, still looking around and trying to find anything unusual. A big part of being a good copper is observational skills, but everything about Nightingale and the Folly seemed normal. Molly hadn't come out to greet me, but that in itself wasn't all that strange. Nightingale smiled at me when I reached the top of the stairs and put his hand on my shoulder. I frowned, a little confused. He still didn't touch me much when we weren't in either his or my bedroom (or the coach house, on more than one occasion). I wouldn't have minded if he had, but it seemed to be his way of making sure that we still maintained a professional relationship while working.

“You said you needed me?” I continued when he didn't reply, and the mischievous grin he gave me then finally convinced me that whatever was going on, it wasn't a dangerous magic-related emergency. Maybe he desperately needed me to do my Latin homework or something equally exciting.

“Oh, I do,” Nightingale just said and actually winked at me. His hand slid from my shoulder down to my back, and he gently manoeuvred me down one of the corridors. The only room that was still used on that corridor, to the best of my knowledge, was Nightingale's bedroom, and sure enough that was where he was taking me. It was considerably larger than my room and had its own en suite bathroom – not that it made a difference, since nobody but me used the communal bathroom on my corridor, except that Nightingale probably didn't get scared out of his wits regularly by Molly sneaking up on him on the way to the bathroom.

While I had settled in well enough, I still often felt like I was using someone else's old room, but Nightingale's room was very much his own. The old mahogany furniture seemed much more fitting for him than for me, but more importantly his room was so clearly lived in. Books on the desk and the nightstand, old photographs, all of them from before the war, notes lying around and cufflinks and pens and just a bit more mess than I would have expected before I had seen his room for the first time. 

I was starting to get a pretty good idea of where this was going, but Nightingale had stubbornly kept this part of our relationship confined to evenings and nights, so I kept expecting him to start talking about a case or my studies until he closed the bedroom door and pushed me back against it with more force than he probably would have needed.

He kissed me hard, with the kind of impatience I'd only ever felt from him when we'd been going at it for a while, his hands untucking my shirt quickly so they could reach my skin. The cufflinks were cool against my sides, but his hands were as warm as ever. I was too dumbfounded to kiss him back at first, although my body caught on much faster than my brain did, because fuck if Nightingale didn't know what he was doing, one hand on my hip, the fingers of the other curling at the back of my neck while he kissed me breathless, and I didn't think I'd ever been with anyone who kissed half as well as he did.

When he broke the kiss, he gave me an almost embarrassed and yet delighted little smile – and I also don't think I'd ever been with anyone who seemed so incredibly happy to get to kiss me. It was flattering. More than that, really. It made me feel all kinds of warm and slightly terrifying things that I didn't really want to think about. But fortunately Nightingale's hands were distracting enough that I didn't have to think about any of them just now.

“I'm afraid I've missed you quite a bit,” Nightingale said, as if he had to justify himself. His fingertips were ghosting over the hair at the nape of my neck, and he was still so close that I could smell his cologne. My hands had found their way to his hips without me even thinking about it.

“Is this what you needed me for?” I asked. Okay, not the smartest question I ever asked, but I couldn't believe that Nightingale had literally just texted me because he was horny.

He laughed a little and shrugged. He didn't blush all that easily, but it was a close thing.

“It seemed like a convenient way of contacting you,” he said, and to his credit he managed to sound almost as cool and proper as usual. I laughed.

“You booty called me, sir.” I couldn't stop grinning. I was glad I didn't have to explain that one – not since the word had come up during an investigation a few months back, when our vic's disappearance had been called in by a girl who had wondered about him not showing up after, well, booty calling her. Nightingale made the same face he'd made back then about the word.

“I didn't _call_ you,” he pointed out.

“It still counts.” I started undoing his tie, and although we had done this dozens of times before, there was still a new thrill to doing it in the middle of the day, with the afternoon sun shining into the room, while we should have been working. It made this feel like a kinky workplace affair, which it technically had been this entire time, but somehow it had never really felt like it. 

I let Nightingale help me out of my shirt, and for a moment I almost forgot to continue teasing him because his lips were on my neck, kissing and biting with the kind of urgency that was hard to resist. Still, this whole thing was too funny for me to let it go just yet.

“All right, at the very least you sexted me,” I said, and to my disappointment he pulled back a little to stare at me.

“I what?”

“Sexting? Sending someone dirty text messages? It's a blend between 'sex' and 'texting',” I explained, and the way he grimaced just made me laugh more. I shouldn't be surprised, not when Nightingale already refused to say 'texting' and stubbornly stuck to 'sending a text message'.

At first I thought that his glare was the only reaction I was going to get, because he moved closer again, pressing me against the door and placing a sharp little bite on my shoulder that made me wince and moan at the same time.

“That was hardly a dirty message,” he said, his voice muffled against my skin as he kept kissing and nibbling on that same spot. I rubbed back against him like an impatient 16-year-old, and it was really kind of embarrassing what Nightingale could do to me by _kissing my shoulder_. I wasn't going to be defeated that easily, though, so I reached down between his legs and squeezed, and he gasped against my skin. Another thing I never would have imagined about Nightingale before: he was bloody loud in bed, all uninhibited moans and whimpers, much more high-pitched than his deep speaking voice, but in a good way (to be honest, the way he completely let go of his usual restraint was just about the hottest thing I'd ever heard, or seen).

“You did say you needed me,” I mumbled into his ear, kissed his jaw the way I knew he liked it.

“Your previous partners must have been quite uninventive if you consider that dirty,” he mumbled, and managed to sound amused even though his breath hitched every time my hand moved even a little bit against his cock. I probably should have felt offended by that because it really wasn't as if I'd never had good sex until I met Nightingale, but I couldn't bring myself to care, not when he suddenly grabbed me by the shoulders, turned us around, and shoved me towards the bed. He'd been more the gentle type whenever we had done this before, and if anything he seemed to like it when I manhandled him a bit, but apparently he was too impatient that day to wait for me to play along. 

A part of me – that stupid part that still had some ridiculous ideas of masculinity, the one that made me feel just a little bit uncomfortable when I went down on him, as if blowing a guy was somehow humiliating when I'd never hesitated to go down on a girl – that same part briefly considered if I should feel intimidated by this, by Nightingale pushing me down on the bed and climbing on top of me and kissing me so hard that all I could do was hold on to him and hope he wouldn't stop. Considering how he was squirming on top of me, I didn't have to worry about that, though, and really all of this felt way too good for me to worry about anything.

* * * * *

The next Saturday I visited my parents for lunch, and just as I was wondering if I should head home and spend the afternoon continuing my _Babylon 5_ rewatch or stick around a bit longer at the risk of getting roped into household chores by my mother, my phone buzzed.

It was Nightingale, but this time his text was, of all things, in Latin. Definitely not an emergency then, since he always went on about how long I still needed to read Latin (even if I actually understood most of it these days, I just needed some time and a dictionary to work my way through – I had no clue how Nightingale managed to read Latin as easily as he read English). He'd known where I was, though, and that I wouldn't have a dictionary at hand, because the sentence was fairly simple. No warped grammatical constructions, and only words that I was familiar with enough not to have to look them up. 

It only took me a few minutes to work through the sentence. Then I stared at it, frowned, and retranslated it.

My mother came back from the kitchen just as I realised that I had definitely got it right the first time and that he had in fact written just what I thought he'd written. I had never thought the erotic Latin poetry he'd given me to read when I'd complained about having to translate dull philosophers all day would come in handy at some point, and I definitely hadn't been so glad that I didn't blush visibly since I was sixteen.

I told my parents some bollocks excuse about a new development in a case and headed back to the Folly immediately. And I tried not to think too much about my life choices now that I had reached the point where I thought sexting in Latin was hot.


End file.
